This delightful novel is divided into three parts and spans several years.Part one: The journey The story starts in 1886 in Ireland. Successive crop failures and brutal English landlords have pushed a family of subsistence farmers to the brink of starvation and close to despair, but not close enough to extinguish a flickering flame of hope and determination. For her own and her family’s survival Brigid, an eighteen year old girl, leaves the only life she has known for an uncertain future on the alien shores of Australia. Her cousin Jamie is on the same ship but in different quarters. Part one focuses on the voyage and in particular the evolving interactions between passengers. These relationships, which can be both romantic and hostile, become the driving force and the glue that shapes the course of their lives. The characters are well drawn and the author displays considerable insight into what motivates people and how various character types are likely to react to each other.Part two: Australia Although the passengers are dropped at various ports, the residual attraction and antagonism of the shipboard liaisons merge with pure chance to draw the passengers towards each other. But circumstances are changing and natural disaster plays its part. Hopes and realities have different agendas and people can be swept in directions they neither planned nor wanted and end in murder. With a body being hidden and the police looking for a missing person it becomes time to change names and find another ship to take them to New Zealand and the possibility of a new venture. Part three: New Zealand Hungry for opportunity, at a time when women were considered genetically unfit for commercial enterprise, the group’s hope focuses on Brigid. Her Irish integrity and outstanding skill at lace making is complimented by Sally’s risk taking, and her ability to use charm and style to manipulate everything from shop windows to financial records. But the local economy is in distress and bigger companies control most of the market. Shadows of their Australian venture fall across their fledgling venture threatening to overwhelm it and snatch away their hopes. As I turned the pages I was taunted by the possibility that the seeds of integrity planted by an eighteen year old girl from County Clare could germinate and grow strongly enough to outmanoeuvre these threats so far from her native home. Vicky Adin leaves us in no doubt about the answer to that question. And at the same time provides an insight into what hope and determination can do when mixed with a bit of Irish charm. I found this a delightful novel that was hard to put down. It has been well researched and reflects considerable understanding of the attitudes of the era. After reading the book I felt I knew and sympathised with the characters. The copy of the book I read is a perfect bound paperback and has an appealing cover that I found most appropriate for the character of the novel. From a handling point of view I felt the publisher could have provided a larger offset gutter as I found it necessary to hold the book open to prevent it from snapping shut if I relaxed my grip. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in people.

The Lives of Alice Pothron, one woman’s escape to freedom by Jenny Harrison with Evelyne Pothron

Courage and determination survive victorious against all oddsThe Lives of Alice Pothron is the result of a chance encounter in 2009 between author Jenny Harrison and Evelyne Pothron. At the time, Evelyne – Alice and Emile Pothron’s daughter – was in search of an author to tell her parents’ amazing story.Born in the very first years of the 20th century, Alice Guyonvernier and Emile Pothron both knew abject poverty as children. These early years, and the miserable years that Alice experienced when an aunt took her to America constitute what she thinks of as her first two lives.The book opens in July 1938 with Alice and Emile, now proud holders of American passports, happily married and comfortably well off but regretfully childless, departing America by ship for a short holiday in France. They haven’t a care in the world. War is brewing in Europe but, incredibly, in America boxer Joe Louis’s victory over Max Schmeling and Howard Hughes’ around-the-world flight excite more interest than world affairs.When the Pothrons arrive in France they find the country still in mourning for the losses of the Great War and in complete denial – there cannot possibly be another war. This then, the years between 1927 when Alice met Emile in his hairdressing salon and his call-up to serve the country of his birth in September 1939, is Alice’s third life – a worry-free time of happiness and love. This comfortable period has cocooned Alice from real life. She has become Americanised, no longer French in her view of the world, her clothes or her way of speaking. With the outbreak of war and Emile serving in a military medical unit, she is about to become an alien in the country of her birth. In The Lives of Alice Pothron, Harrison enriches the telling of Alice and Emile’s stories (based on the recollections of their only daughter, Evelyne) with pertinent details of the bigger picture of France’s situation and mind-set prior to the outbreak of war and conditions for ordinary civilians during the war. Added to the mix is the Pothrons’ beloved dog that has come with them from America and their much longed-for daughter, born in June 1939. The threads of the story are an account of constant danger, hardship and heartbreak, and of amazing strength, ingenuity and courage. Alice’s need to protect Evelyne at all costs see her learning to live once again in poverty, drawing water from the well, cooking on a wood stove and coping with rationing. Harrison’s account of events in Alice and Emile’s lives after they are separated by war is both bleak and grim, but at the same time there are moments of humour. Their almost parallel paths as fugitives heading south into unoccupied France and eventual safety are an inspiring tribute to the Resistance workers who risked all to help them: guiding them, feeding them their own precious food, providing a dry bed and then handing them on like a parcel to the next link in the clandestine chain. As Alice comments …it always seems to be winter… in this book. Harrison has succeeded, through dwelling on the long, bitterly cold winters in the north of France, and beautiful prose, to convey the cruelty of the war’s impact on ordinary people …a blue-fingered morning, cloudless with a chill that stubbornly hung on the shirt tails of the night. The Lives of Alice Pothron does have a happy ending (as mentioned in the back-cover blurb) and it is a story driven by unfaltering love, but it sensitively recounts a time in our history without a trace of romanticism. I found the book very thought provoking and often found myself thinking how lucky we are. My only disappointment with The Lives of Alice Pothron is that I would have liked to know, even briefly, how life turned out for Alice, Emile and Evelyne when they returned to America in 1942.

The author, retired nurse and former hospice volunteer, donates 50% of proceeds from the sale of this book to three North Shore hospices. That seems appropriate as the stories would make good reading for anyone wanting short reads, such as during a hospital stay. Most of the tales are set in New Zealand – they’re human, lightly humorous, unpretentious slice-of-life stories. Some, particularly those that relate incidents of country life, read more like anecdotes of the sort that a family and friends might share at social get-togethers. They are varied. Among the storylines there are some memorable scenarios. Mrs Beeton, long-dead doyenne of domesticity, appears in a contemporary kitchen bent on instructing a present-day woman in culinary skills. (“The tiny buttons on her black boots fascinated me; no doubt she had a lady’s maid; certainly one accomplished in the use of button-hooks, and so well able to delicately loop each into its small hole. I looked at my Crocs.”) A brother and sister argue over where to site a house on their land. The thoughts of an example of living art (“Bring on the philanthropists and the open wallets. They ease my pain.”) An 80-year old woman meets up with an old love. Another of similar vintage falls for a bass baritone. A present-day woman takes Katherine Mansfield to a café in Takapuna. It’s good to see some locations and characters recur in different stories. Throughout, the author shows keen observation of both the social world and human behavior. Her colloquial prose is enlivened by metaphors and similes, and is polished so it reads easily. Five poems are among the 22 items. These too are colloquial and personal, though they differ in tone. Of them, I was particularly taken by Hey! You! that addresses forces present in South Island topography. This well-produced volume of 154 pages makes a good gift to anyone forced to endure a hospital stay, or who simply appreciates short reads.

Presumed Guilty is a standalone novel, the third book in the Sasha Stace series. Sasha is a lawyer in New Zealand’s South Island. After many years at the bar, she is weary of criminal law. She’s tired of “living in a world where two showers a day is not enough.” Promotion to the High Court bench offers a brighter future, but when her ex-partner faces murder charges, Sasha agrees to defend him, and puts that future at risk. ​ Sasha is an intriguing and sympathetic character. The dramatic courtroom scenes are well drawn, and shadowy political plotters add to the suspense. The author builds a realistic backdrop with detailed descriptions of the murder scene and beautiful coastal Akaroa. The criminals are convincingly creepy and ruthless, and some of them meet suitably nasty fates. The author keeps some shocking and unexpected twists for the very end. They’re worth waiting for. ​ The large supporting cast and weight of back history distract from the flow of events on occasion. I didn’t want to know quite so much about Sasha’s personal issues and family dramas, either. Sasha is a strong, independent woman. She doesn’t need a wrapping of domesticity to make her real. And I’m not sure the inclusion of various Australians adds much to an already complex plot. But these are minor quibbles.​ I love the New Zealand setting, and the mix of courtroom drama and criminal investigation. Sasha’s integrity overcomes the forces of evil, a universal theme which adds to the story’s appeal. ​ I recommend Presumed Guilty to readers of crime fiction.

New Zealand Secondary Schools and Your Child: a Guide for Parents​by Bali Haque

Bali Haque’s latest work is New Zealand Secondary Schools and Your Child: A Guide for Parents and the book certainly lives up to the promise inherent in the title, for it is a carefully-compiled and comprehensive response to an often-heard observation that “I’ve no idea what they do at school these days.” Whilst it’s good to know that schools are therefore keeping up with the pace of change in society, it’s equally comforting to know that books such as this one exist to help lay people pick a path through what can be a confusing and even tortuous process. In its 77,000 words arranged in eleven chapters, the Guide considers the choice of school; its structure including governance, teachers, discipline systems, pastoral care and bullying; the curriculum; and perhaps most important of all from a vocational perspective, the minefield of the NCEA process and results; reports and interviews, and special needs. All these are explained in precise and impeccable language which is also conversational, and mercifully jargon-free. This is nowhere more noticeable than in the sections devoted to NCEA. One suspects that this will be the major selling-point of the book, for that section is as excellent as one would expect given the author’s background in that area. On looking at the notes made during the reading process, one is struck by the number of times the words “clear”, “logical”, “well-explained”, “comprehensive”; and “sound advice” appear, for the benefit of a parent in need of good advice. As noted, it is a comprehensive and valuable guide to parents of secondary school students, and that cannot be overstated. Teachers, especially those who endured the birth-pangs of ‘Tomorrow’s Schools’ in the early nineties, may well have viewpoints that are not apparent to the parents for whom the book is intended, and that is as it should be. One such instance is the author’s comments on how the principal ‘holds most of the (power) cards’ and it is tempting to respond that, while schools have always been driven by professionals, until the restructuring wrought by the Fourth Labour Government they were supported in that by a team that included professional overseers in inspectors and advisers and administrative professionals in the ten departments of education throughout the country. Under the premise that anyone could administer and oversee education, Lange’s contribution to educational restructuring was to strip away the support network so that the burden of guidance for lay people devolved upon principals alone, and whilst Haque acknowledges this, it seems uber-critical to cavil at the power which that functionary wields faute de mieux. Similarly, I found myself questioning whether the section in chapter three that deals with pedagogy, and in particular pages 76 and 77, offering a ‘checklist’ of teacher competence that can be used by lay people, ought really to be in a book that offers parents the ‘big picture’ of secondary education. In this, it is easy to see ‘the administrator view’, one which is often at variance with that of a teacher facing thirty-odd students, whom Haque himself is generous enough to admit are not always tractable or even interested in a subject which may not be a teacher’s strength, in a room which is often too small for the sorts of interaction he lauds. Those reservations aside, though, this is an outstanding guide for parents to the New Zealand secondary school and will be worth every cent of its modest purchase price to the market at which it is aimed.

FlaxFlower Reviews

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